As visitors to Argentina and especially its capital, Buenos Aires, have discovered for more than a century, the country is like a little piece of Europe transplanted to South America.

In contrast to most of the rest of the continent, Argentina has few indigenous people, and there was virtually no slave trade for most of the country's history. Most of the residents are descended from European immigrants. Buenos Aires, as author Brian Winter discovered, "appeared to be a glittering oasis of European civilization at the end of the world."

In fact, when Winter travelled to Argentina, newly graduated from university and with a typical self-centred college student's almost total lack of knowledge of the rest of the world, the country was about to plunge into an economic abyss that saw inflation soar to triple digits, banks totter and fail, and governments get tossed aside. In fact, at one point during Winter's visit, the country had five changes of government in little more than a month.

Still, economic turbulence is nothing new for Argentina, which was one of the five richest countries of the world in the 1930s before its economy collapsed.

As Winter learns, "Argentina had been on a hopeless, seemingly irreversible 70-year losing streak - it was like the Chicago Cubs of countries. ... Perhaps no other nation had fallen so far, so fast."

The Argentinians accept this fact, even embrace it, as Winter discovers during one of his first walks around Buenos Aires, when he hears a song on the radio. "The world was and always will be a piece of s---, this much I know," the lyrics began. "In the year 506, and in 2000 also."

"That's our national anthem, you know," a woman calls out to him. Actually, it's not. It's called Cambalache, and it could be termed Argentina's unofficial national anthem. After all, what national anthem could proudly proclaim that its country is not No. 1 or No. 2, but not even in the top 10.

Yet Winter falls in love with Argentina as it plunges into some of the worst years in its turbulent history, a situation he likens to "falling for an alcoholic at the very moment she hits rock bottom."

Winter never manages to solve the puzzle that is Argentina, although he does learn that the world of the milongas, the nightclubs where Argentines meet to dance the tango, offers insights into the country's culture.

Winter, bored and unable to find a job, decides he wants to learn how to tango, which brings him to the Nino Bien, one of the legendary milongas of Buenos Aires.

He avoids falling into the trap of believing the tango, that outmoded symbol of Latin American machismo, is a lens through which to view Argentina. But he does learn that a dance suited for romantics and cynics seems especially adapted to Argentina and can teach the visitor something about the people.

Winter meets the denizens of the Nino Bien, such as El Tigre, a grizzled ex-sailor whose proudest boast is that he danced the tango with Madonna when that pop icon was in Buenos Aires during the making of the movie Evita. He takes tango lessons at the unlikely venue of an Armenian cultural centre and falls in love, at least a little bit, with a tattooed dance instructor.

But he also moves smoothly from the dance floor to the streets and to the library. As he traces the roots of the tango (no one seems to know exactly where and when it originated), he digresses smoothly into a discussion of the country's yo-yo history of economic wealth and bitter poverty, the collapse of the rural economy, and the rise - and subsequent fall - of the gaucho, the South American cowboy who supplies one of the persistent myths of Argentina for residents and visitors alike.

Winter, now an editor with USA Today, provides a glimpse into Argentina's soul and writes a love letter to a passionate and proud country that has huge problems but is prepared to put up with them and even to laugh about its woes, perhaps to keep from crying.

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